Iola Klittie wears her ballet tutu to class
and little Tiara and banner proclaiming her Miss Jr. Kewanee Hog Day Festival
’90. The weird thing about Iola Klitty
is that, even though her weight is comparable enough to be Bev Pines
progeny-she has the most beautiful smile that has ever been spotted on campus.
Reviled by jocks and losers alike, she waltzes on the tip of her toes, in
between classes sashaying and pirouetting. Often Ollie Holiday will carry her
books. Olivia “Ollie” Holiday’s locker is right next to Meredith-Elise’s
locker. Meredith keeps postcards of Picasso’s Blue period epoxied inside her
locker as well as works of Modigliani. While the Losers scale the rungs of the Yellow
Monkey bars Cabbages McGranahn and Meredith Elise exit the Café Hemlock and
skulk down to the cemetery in the lower portion of logan field to smoke clove
cigarettes, discuss ennui and juvenile sexual-incompetency, parochial tyranny
and (oh yes) to occasionally get stones employing a hitter shaped like a Hello
Kitty Pacifier.
“I always have a hard time
inhaling it,”
“Just think of it as vintage
clove and inhale gracefully like this?”
“Like this?”
“Yes- “
“Meredith-?”
‘Yes vodoo dollbaby?”
“Before you start talking like a
fucking English teacher and start saying things like, ‘The salubrious,
medicinal benefits of THC primarily is
that it artistically assuages the ennui of life here in the cracker-barrel
helmet of the midwest-I was just wondering if you think we’ll ever get in
trouble for smoking grass during recess…”
“Doll babybuttercup-you have to
first understand one thing,”
“Which is?”
Pause. Meredith-Elise takes
another hit. The smoke seeps through her lips like exhaust from the dryer in
late November, “When you, my oh-so knee-swaggering worry-wart, smoke grass,
your eyes actually become more hazel.”
“Really,”
“As illuminant grove-gulley hazel ensconced in a
fair-cheek-ed socket lass, I assure you by the sweat of my fair forehead.”
“Thanks,”
“Doesn’t Hale ever make analogies
like that about your physique?”
Cabbage’s McGranahan’ hazel eyes
swing North, near the Yellow monkey bars and the mulch pile which Bev pine uses
to empty her CRISCO lard barrel twice a week. She can see three shadows fall
upon the heapy mulch. Hale is the largest and right now, his shadow seems to be
gesticulating in such a way that it is making Pat McReynolds shadow angry. She can see Hale’s shadow sway
back and forth, as if he is dancing with his shoulders.
“Well,” Cabbages mutter,
outdrawn. “Hale did say that my eyes were like two peas in a pods once-but I
think he just said that to get some. You know Hale--poor boy can’t go three
hours without a little, ‘Whew-hoo!’. Cabbages shifts her shoulders and performs
a little jolly Hale jig.
Trundling near Edvard
Stinkenhauser’s tombstone is Iola Klitty and Ollie Holiday. Ollie is performing
her ballet leaps and Iola, with her apostolic Christian denim dress that picks
up dirt every time she goes outside, has open her annotated N.I.V.
concentrating in a highlighted verse.
“Careful Klitoraus, Cabbages is
filling in her sexual cabinet.”
“Ohmigod, you girls are like
having so many lustful and dirty thoughts-I like, love it.”
“Naughty-knotty,” Meredith-Elise
makes a cross with her two forefingers and then brushes the top one over the
bottom one as if she is endeavoring to generate heat friction to create an
outback fire. Then she stops.
“Don’t you find it just a tad bit
esoteric that our main hangout is like a cemetery?” Iola inquires, using her
most mature voice, in front of Meredith-Elise.
“Actually, this was once Indian
Mounds, so the urban legend goes?”
“It’s true,” Cabbages intervenes.
“Hale claims that Patrick found a femur in the catacombs once when he was being
punished.”
The girls look up. On the sidelines
the cheerleaders patter plams and perform jumping jacks in front of Eric
Bushman and Ganon Bowman. Marcellus Buck nearly always spends his recess period
in one of the skybox-with Dwaynesha Terris-who already, at the tender age of
fourteen, has given birth to three of Marcellus Buck’s twelve progeny.
Apparently Buck claims that, once he goes pro, more than likely next fall, he
will move Dwaynesha out of subsidized housing and hopefully, back to either Wllmignham
or East Lansing. Connie Whitman jumps up and down. Karen pretty much performs a
cheer in which she orgasmically titters every portion of her ample body and
then sputters out the names of the starting five, one hand whisked between her
legs in what she defines as being a borderline salute. Angie Passages sticks up
her middle finger and calls Meredith-Elise a self righteous bookworm with very
outdated spectacles.
“What pricks-if I may say so, in
the name of Holy Moses,”
“Iola, you’re finally, in you’re
A.C. snug naiveté-starting to come around,”
“When my mother first enrolled me
in this academy-Coach M. said that he thought that an A.C. was something you
turned on for five months out of the year.”
“Hale always says that Coach M.
never knows whether to scratch his wrist or wind his watch-or is it the other
way around?”
“Scratching your wrist is a sign
of impotency,” Meredith-Elise notes.
“What’s that,” Iola Klitty,
inquires.
“Iola, you go to the most
licentious school in the country. Everything, everything that transpires inside
these walls has something to do with scoring. How can you not see that?”
“Meredith-Elise face slowly
rotates toward the pyramid of limbs and giggles and side pony tails held
together by scrunches. In the center, leading the girls, is Junior Varsity
Cheerleading Captain Hyacinth Hollis Lyoniski, a girl Meredith was once asked
to partner up with over sliced frog spleen in anatomy lab, only she ended up
getting stuck with Heidi Fairchild, because Doctor Marshal came into supervise
the classroom and insisted that the popular girls namely, i.e., cheerleaders,
partner together to cultivate an even tighter feminine bond. Meredith-Elise has always wanted to hang out
with Hollis. She has seen Hollis checking out both Dave VonB and Patrick
McReynolds several times and once she was even livid because she saw VonB stare
at her ass in the lunch line, the way he used to stare and salivate and ogle on
her, Meredith-Elise’s shoulder pad. Before Cabbages fingers the hitter and taps
it against one of the grave, Meredith thinks about how cool it would be if
people would accept you-if strangers would talk to you. If you could watch
90210 reruns nightly and phone each other afterwards and hold slumber parties
where people did girly things like paint and sprinkle appendages and gossip and
talk about god in front of a my and the fourth American vowel. She wonders what
an official CLS basketball game is all about. Von Behren used to work non-stop
on his three pointer two season ago when Meredith first moved to this school
from a little country shack outside of Havana, IL. VonBehren was a tenth
reserve and, although he never missed a three, Coach M. put him in the game to
commit fouls against the other team. The one time when the game was close and
VonBehren went for a foul and ended up stealing the ball instead, he drove down
the left hand side of the court and fired up the winning three to send the game
into overtime. Coach M. was paralyzed with fury on the sidelines, claiming that
VonB was a Judas and that he didn’t have enough self-esteem to be honored wearing
a jersey of this caliber. VonBehren then left the game, but not without calling
up his friends Hale and Patrick—Patrick, who somehow got a photograph of
Lillian Looney, Coach M.’s thirteen year old
illegitimate granddaughter-who-for some reason, inexplicable-was
enrolled in Concordia after her year at D.O.C. for stealing her father’s Volvo
and driving to a PHISH and then selling the transmission to a stranded Hippie
bungalow in exchange for three grams of shrooms-which she took, all at
once-waking up three months later-asking her mom and dad where all the
squirrels with the big ears disappeared to. Pat and Hale used to hang out
(Coach M claims that they were the ones who corrupted their precious little
angel by introducing her to a certain band called Metallica when she was in the
third grade)-and on several occasion, Lillian would sneak into the Mcreynolds
basement at three in the morning and the boys would pillage mama McReynolds
medicine cabinet, which had non-child proof caps and non-mathematical proof labeled on the sides and, at one party,
Lillian, yanked down D. Hale’s tropical speedo and continued (much to the
chagrin of Patrick-who, for some reason, never seems to get any in his own
house these days) continued to give Hale some serious down south mouth head as the
sun rose and Hale tipped Allan a Kennedy
half to take a Polaroid of the momentous occasion so that the photograph
pictured Lillian I. Looney with her eyes locked and her face supplicating
between two thighs the size of an arm chair and, by the end of the triple Comet
overtime win (Coach M. informing the press that, even thought it may have
looked like seldom used defense reserve D. VonBehren stole the ball and made
the tying three-it was actually Eric Brushman who, momentarily had his contacts
out and hair dyed brown) pounding on the locker and talking about, “How bad we
is,” Coach M. entered the locker room, to compliment his kids when he found a
copier machine, relocated from the teacher lounge, in the middle of the shower
room Athletic-fungus fueled floor, locked on 1000x copies, ejaculating
digitalized color copies of Lillian, Coach M.’s only daughter, going down on
someone with rather large legs and acting like she enjoyed it more than the
drugs or basketball. Apparently coach M just lost it, and, when no player came
forth and admitted the culprit he ran to the visitor locker room with a handful
of digitalized Xeroxes and beat the ever living shit out of the HomeValley
Horseman that Opie Lippet had to be hospitalized and eventually fell into a
coma before his lifeline was mysteriously unplugged afterhours-Mr. Mooney
saying he was very sorry but was out of town on that date, offering a reward
and free in state tuition to the family
who finds the murderer, telling the press that he needs to take it easier when
he rushed into the VISTORS locker room to shake the lead forwards paw next
time. Out of the one thousand pictures printed, nine hundred eighty-seven of
them have been accounted for.
David Hale has three, framed and autographed, at home near
his inventions table. It is rumored that Doctor Marshal Kennedy has one locked
up in her safety deposit box underneath the cushions of her Rainbow patience
couch. The other eight were purportedly sent out to global dignitaries-the
president of the United States, the Queen Mother, Gorby as well as others, out
of only two, Fidel Castro and Francois Mitterrand, sent back a thank you to
coach M, Castro’s included a cigar which Coach M. used on intern, Miss Renae,
or so it was wildly rumored. Coach M. Held a Shadrach, Meeshak, and Abindgo
outing, where Hale, VonB, and Patrick were all coerced into wearing DEPEND diapers
as mock loin cloths and then forced to stand very close to the Homecoming
bondfire-the night ended with a wiener roast and sing-a-long and in the morning-when the inferno waned, Patrick,
VonB and Hale, still stood up, chilled, dew trickling down their spines
wondering if they could go home now, to pray to their own mattress gods and
goddesses.
Meredith looks up. Holly does a
cheer, turns around, looks at Patrick who, from the fifty meter distant of the
cemetery to the Yellow monkey bars and the cheerleader mosh pit, it looked like
Patrick just blew Holly a kiss on the top of his forefinger and fired it her
way, using his signature shotgun. Cabbages takes a long hit and passes it past
Meredith-Elise and to Ollie Holiday, who takes a long drag and blows smoke out
from between her lips.
“Go ahead, Iola, try it.”
“Is that like, illegal,”
“Everything that’s fun is
illegal, Iola.” Utters cabbages, “Just look at Hale,” She points near the big
man who has momentarily stepped off the Yellow Monkey Bars and is showing Jebediah
Noel the proper methodology in the art of the Hoola Hoop. “He’s fun,”
“And he should be illegal, sex
with him anyways”
The girls giggle. Iola crosses
herself and looks up at a mashed cloud.
The sky has a London Earl gray flavor inked into it.
“Easy girls, whooooh, going just
a leetle bit too fast for Iola here.”
Iola begins to mutter something which sounds like a prayer
“Ear,” Ollie turns into Iola, “It
will help relax you,”
“Why is it that whenever people
get high and pass a joint around between them after looking both ways first to
secure that no one is watching them-why is it that they always say the word,
‘ear’. Like the body part?”
“Johosephats-I just couldn’t.
Isn’t it written in the holy book that thou shalt not….”
“Thou shalt is written on every
scale, in every fixed dragon’s fairy tale,” Meredith leashes back, quoting some
philosopher she once heard her old man talk about all he time, before he
retired for the evening to his word processor and drank fifth and fell asleep
at the keyboard, trying to make sense of the keys he inadvertently slept on and
the mothership messages produced...”
“So what do you think, Iola?”
“Dude-it’s like, smooth.”
“If you squint hard enough you’ll
see Moses entering the new gymnasium.”
“Don’t fuck with her like that.
That’s only Marcellus Buck getting ready to do his whole tedious LET MY PEOPLE
GO routine,”
“Iola? Iola?”
“Give her a minute-she’s going
form A.C. to T.H.C. It’s quite an arduous transition.”
“Iola?”
“For fuck’s sake she’s not gonna
O.D. is she?”
“No.” Meredith-Elise looks
straight into the limpid pool of Iola’s eyes, which are slowly starting to have
little red arteties branch across the
whites like wings. “Iola, if you can hear me-EXHALE.”
Iola looks out, closes the lids
on her eyes like maritime window shudders before her bodyshakes and wrings and
smoke comes filtering out on all sides. She falls down where Ollie and Cabbages
continue to help her out.
“Iola paperdollygirl. Are you
alright?”
“Dude,” Iola says, slowly
reopening her eyes and trying to adjust herself in the presence of her
girlfriends. Ollie wreathes her arms around her friend. Cabbages is rubbing
Iola’s palm in the manner of a clairvoyant expecting serious pay.
Meredith-Elise simply stares back at her acquaintance and asks if she would
like another hit of air before she divulges out any more of the green stuff.
Iola speaks, sounding like she just arrived from somewhere over the rainbow and
you were there and you were there and there was someone dressed up exactly
like……………..
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